Passage to Natchez Page 8

  Clardy took a mental note of that.

  Johnson went on: “Besides, they got a … different way of thinking about women.” He looked sly. “Did you know they got three women in that cabin, and share them all? Every deuced one of them women has a belly full of baby right now, too, and God only knows who fathered which. And only one of them women is married by law to either one of them boys. That’s Sally, the pretty one, and the youngest. She’s Little Harpe’s wife. Preacher’s daughter, she is! You heard of Parson Rice? That’s her pap. Ain’t that a caution, eh? Why the good parson ever let his little gal marry a man like Little Harpe, I’ll never figure.”

  “Which one’s Little Harpe?”

  “Wiley. He’s the small-boned one. Micajah, he’s Big Harpe. And he’s a man to respect, let me tell you, if you want to keep your heart a-beating.”

  Clardy took another swallow of whiskey. His head was spinning now, and felt full of cotton besides. Rapidly he was losing the ability to make sense of anything. But one thing Johnson had said kept coming through the mental murk: Those that help them they don’t hurt. Maybe the answer for his dilemma wasn’t to flee the Harpes, but to work his way into their good graces. He could embark on his criminal career by way of an established and apparently successful gang. Rather than betray the Harpes to the law, he could become their ally. Let Thias worry about the rights and wrongs; he would worry only about himself.

  Johnson talked on about the Harpes, speaking in one breath as if he admired them greatly and in the next as if he intended to use them for his own ends and wind up with Sally before it was done. By now Hughes’s whiskey had let Clardy forget the beheaded corpse of Selma Van Zandt, the apparent murder of Abel Van Zandt, and the mortal fear of the Harpes he had held. The more Johnson talked, the better the opportunity being laid out sounded. Johnson said that the Harpes were busily involved in stealing hogs, cattle, and horses from their neighbors. They stole more hogs than anything else, slaughtering them and delivering the meat for sale in Knoxville. They always sold the meat fully dressed so the source couldn’t be identified.

  At length Clardy put aside the whiskey, realizing that if he continued drinking he would pass out. He also was dimly aware that Thias might show up, looking for him as he had sometimes before. If Thias found him passed out and took him home, he would wake up back in the cabin again, with Grandpap cussing him while his head rang with the miseries that accompany the morning after drinking. It would not do to pass out.

  Johnson’s ruddy face was close to his all at once. “Well, Clardy, are you with us?”

  “With … us …”

  “You come with me, and they’ll let you join.” He winked. “Maybe they’ll even wind up sharing their women with you, too.”

  Clardy nodded. “I’ll … go with you.…”

  Johnson reached across and gently slapped Clardy’s shoulder. “That’s good, Clardy. You made the right choice. You’ll be a better-off man for making it.”

  The next thing Clardy knew, he was struggling up into his saddle. Johnson was ahead, already mounted, urging him to move more quickly. “We’ll go talk to them, let them meet you,” Johnson said. “They’ll like you, Clardy. They’ll let you in.”

  Then he rode, and how he managed to remain in the saddle was a mystery to him. The night air was cold and slightly sobering. It came to him that they were riding out to meet the Harpes themselves, men frightening enough that he had been ready to flee the region because of them. But Clardy was impulsive at all times, and even more so when he was drunk. He rode on behind Johnson with no sense of fear, no thought that what he was doing was anything but sensible. Opportunity had reached out to him tonight, and he was ready to accept it enthusiastically.

  CHAPTER 8

  Clardy devoted full concentration to remaining in the saddle. The farther he rode, the more difficult that was, partly because Johnson had led him off the main road and onto a rugged, narrow path that sliced through a particularly dismal-looking finger of forest. Clardy was woozy and having much trouble thinking, but with what part of his mind wasn’t fully beclouded, he wondered eagerly about the Harpes. Hughes’s liquor had stripped him of his former worries, and he thought nothing at all about the fact he was heading into the lair of the very men he had been ready to flee earlier in the day.

  After long riding, Johnson paused and sniffed the air. “Smell that? Smells like the flesh of a fine woman to me! We’re near their place now—near my own dear Sally!”

  Clardy slurred out, “I don’t smell no woman. Just pigs.”

  Johnson frowned at him. “That’s their swine pen you’re smelling. Come on. We’re nearly there.”

  Five minutes later they rode out of the woods into a clearing where stood one of the crudest, squatly built cabins Clardy had ever seen. No one had bothered to hew out or even debark these logs, and the notching had no style or neatness. Poorly rounded, ragged saddle notches had been hacked in the logs, some of which still had branches protruding from them, being used as hangers for ’possum, fox, and deer hides hung out to dry. The chinking looked like pure mud, with no sticks or straw to help make it firm.

  The roof had no shingles, just big roof boards held down by logs pinned in place. The chimney was of sticks and mud and leaned perilously out from the cabin, ready to fall in the next good rain, yet no one had bothered to put a prop against it to hold it in place. Smoke and sparks poured out of the chimney top, which barely cleared the peak of the roof. Clardy caught a whiff of cooking meat. Fatty pork, he guessed. It was hard to be sure, considering the various competing stenches that hung about the place. The strongest of these was the fetor of the swine penned inside a crude rectangular fence standing about fifty feet east of the cabin. The swine had rooted and trampled the pen floor into muck, and were so deeply sunk in it that they appeared to have no legs. They put out such a stench, it cut through the alcoholic haze and actually made Clardy feel a little sobered.

  There were no real outbuildings about the cabin, just some crude lean-to shelters built haphazardly in the clearing, which was filled with dead, girdled trees that would fall one by one over the next few years if the occupants didn’t get around to cutting them down first. Considering their obvious lack of concern with their surroundings, Clardy doubted they would ever bother.

  “Sorry looking sort of place, Cale,” he said.

  “Aw, they’re not ones to pretty up their dwelling,” Johnson said. “But it don’t matter. They’ve got a good situation here. Two men, three women … that’s the life, ain’t it? Can you just imagine?”

  A plain, ungroomed woman in a ragged frock appeared in the open cabin door. Even from where he was, Clardy could see that she was as filthy as the hogs that wallowed in the pen. Probably smelled no better.

  “Surely that ain’t the woman you’re so hot to steal for yourself, is it, Cale?” Clardy whispered.

  “Lord, no! That’s Susanna. She come with them from North Carolina. Calls herself the wife of Micajah, yet generally goes by the last name of Roberts. I’d sooner take up with a she-bear than with her. Sally’s the one I like—she’s Wiley’s wife.” Johnson raised his hand and waved. “Howdy do, Susanna! It’s Cale Johnson here! Is your men at home?”

  The woman’s voice was flat and lifeless. “No.”

  “Will they be coming back directly?”

  “Yes.”

  “Where’d they go?”

  She pointed west. Johnson side-spoke to Clardy: “Ain’t much for talking, these Harpe women. Wears you out to get anything out of them.” He called out, “Well, you reckon we could come down and wait for them?”

  “Who’s with you?”

  “A friend of mine. A man your men will be wanting to meet.”

  Another figure appeared behind Susanna Roberts, and Johnson almost danced in his saddle. “That’s Sally!” he whispered excitedly. He waved again, vigorously, and called, “Howdy, Sally! I see you yonder!” Then again to Clardy: “Ain’t she pretty? Ain’t she?”

  To the extent
that he was thinking at all, Clardy contemplated that the woman, hardly more than a girl, really, might indeed be pretty if you could see beneath the dirt and get past the deadness of her expression. Both her and Susanna had the most listless, blank looks that he had ever seen on any of the faces of womankind.

  “They look right fat,” Clardy commented, noting to himself that Sally was not waving back at Johnson.

  “I told you, the Harpe boys got them all three full of babies.”

  “Oh. Aye.” Clardy had forgotten.

  Susanna yelled, “Reckon you can come on down.”

  “Let’s go,” Johnson said. “Clardy, I’m going to introduce you to the finest piece of womanflesh what ever walked the earth. And she’s going to be mine one of these days.”

  “So you keep telling me,” Clardy replied.

  There was something sobering about entering the house of the Harpes. By the time Clardy’s eyes had adjusted to the interior shadows, he felt the first glimmerings of doubt that he had been wise to come here. It was only a flicker of a thought, however, quickly forgotten in the midst of the distractions around him.

  Cale Johnson was in the best of moods. He perched on a three-legged stool, with Sally at his side, seated on the floor and paying him no heed at all. In fact she was staring at Clardy, as were all the women. Not with evident suspicion, welcome, or desire. They simply stared. Clardy figured he was a curiosity in their eyes, like some blind fox that had wandered through the door by accident.

  He mentally corrected that analogy. A fox would at least fetch a reaction out of these blank women, who would probably kill and skin it, as they had many other animals whose hides now covered almost the entire interior wall surface. The fat hadn’t been scraped away very well from the underside of most of the skins, so the stagnant air reeked of dead flesh. And of other things: the stench of swine outside, of humans and dogs—there were six of the latter on the dirt floor—the foulness of the various piles of bodily wastes that lay ignored all around the place. Most looked to be the product of the dogs. Some, Clardy couldn’t help noticing, looked like they might be … he tried not to think about it.

  “Sally, you’re one of them women who looks all the prettier when she’s with child,” Johnson was saying. “If it’s a girl, I’ll wager she’ll be pretty as her maw.”

  No answer. Still the same dead stare at Clardy Tyler.

  “I believe I’ll step outside and smoke my pipe,” Clardy said.

  “Don’t go out there,” said the third woman, whose name Clardy would later learn was Betsy.

  “Why?”

  “If Micajah comes back and sees you there, he’ll shoot you.”

  “Shoot me?”

  “Now, don’t get all fearful,” Johnson cut in. “He won’t shoot you if you stay put in here and I introduce you to him.”

  Time passed. Johnson kept talking, everything directed at Sally, his adoration for her obvious yet seemingly unnoticed, or perhaps simply ignored, by the women. The staring continued. Meanwhile, Clardy began to grow more sober and more uncertain that he should have come here. As darkness fell outside the cabin and a chill spread through the room—Why didn’t they close the door? Did no one else feel as cold as he?—he thought about Abel Van Zandt and pondered the fact that the Harpes were probably his killers. He wondered how the brothers would react when they discovered him here, and found out that Cale Johnson had already revealed the facts about their criminal operations to a man they hadn’t approved.

  Clardy’s thoughts were broken by the appearance of a figure at the door. And what a figure it was! Clardy felt his heart jump and his extremities go cold.

  It was Micajah Harpe, tall, broad, and ugly. He had come into the doorway with the silence of a ghost. Just behind him was Wiley, whose eyes were wild and bright and fixed on Clardy. On his face was a look that was anything but welcoming, anything but pleasant.

  Micajah strode straight to Clardy and stared down at him. Clardy wondered if he should stand, but remained where he was. The big man’s gaze upon him was chilling, aimed out from shadowed eye pits beneath thick, dark brows.

  “What I want to know, Cale,” Micajah Harpe said in a voice so soft it belied his fearsome appearance, “is who is this here sod, and why in hell did you bring him into my house?”

  For the next two hours Clardy Tyler’s life became a descent into the most bizarre world he had ever stumbled into, one that left him completely sober when he emerged from it. His impulsive desire to join the Harpes had died, along with most of his intoxication, the moment Micajah had looked into his face. An intensely disturbing moment had followed soon after when Johnson told the Harpes that he had informed Clardy about their stock theft operations. Wiley had leaped up, drawing a knife, cursing Johnson as a betrayer, and would have slashed it across Johnson’s throat had not Micajah stopped him.

  “Leave him be,” he said. “Maybe this gent here can be a help to us. I like the look of him.” He turned to Clardy. “Are you a young man of grit?”

  “I am.” Clardy did his best to look strong and hardened. There was no backing out of this now. He was here, the facts were out, and he had no choice but to play along.

  Micajah Harpe rose and advanced closer to him. Clardy found himself compelled to stare him in the eye. “Are you a man who is loyal to them who are his friends, and the devil to them who ain’t?” Micajah asked.

  “I am.”

  Micajah came closer another step. His eyes glittered. “Are you a man who’s not afraid to kiss death right on the mouth and find it the sweetest kind of woman, whether it be his own death or the deaths of them he kills?”

  “I ain’t afraid of nothing,” Clardy declared. But he was afraid, afraid of Micajah himself.

  Micajah suddenly drew his belt axe and heaved it straight at Clardy’s head. Clardy yelped and ducked. The hatchet stuck fast in the log wall behind him. Had he remained unmoving, it would have missed him by less than an inch. Wiley Harpe hooted and cackled. The women remained as expressionless as ever and made not a sound.

  Clardy looked up at Micajah Harpe, temper surging … but anger could not long survive the harsh stare from that broad and ugly face. His temper withered to a husk and was replaced by outright fear. Micajah stepped near and bent over, pushing his face right into Clardy’s. He spoke so low that no one else in the room could hear him. Those glittering eyes burned more brightly than ever. “You work with us, boy, and you become one of us. You stay loyal to us no matter what, and you do what we tell you, no matter what it is. You understand me?”

  “Yes.”

  “We’re hard men, me and my brother. Hard as the hell-baked hide of Old Scratch hisself, and thrice as mean. If the devil rose in this room this very night, he’d bow to me and say, ‘Micajah Harpe, I’m at your service, for in your time you’ve outdid the worst I’ve ever thunk of.’ And it would be the truth. I’m a wicked man, boy. So’s my brother. You ain’t knowed wickedness—pure, poison-blooded, pit-of-hell, spit-on-the-Bible wickedness—until you’ve knowed the Harpe brothers.”

  Clardy was having trouble drawing his breath. The stench of Micajah Harpe’s body and filthy clothing, the fetor of his breath, and the fear that had Clardy’s insides in turmoil, all played their part in that. He was scared to the marrow, to the core of his soul.

  And yet, curiously, when he looked into Micajah’s piercing eyes, he felt a troubling, unexplainable desire to want to gain this man’s favor. And he could not tear his own eyes away from Micajah’s.

  Micajah Harpe fell silent but kept on staring, his broad face scarcely five inches from Clardy’s. There was no reading this man, no fathoming what thoughts were bubbling in the caldron of his mind. Clardy was so terrified he began to grow weak.

  Slowly Micajah smiled, showing yellowed, brown-streaked teeth. “I do like you, boy. You could be one of us. But there’s a thing you must do for me,” he said, still whispering. “Your friend yonder—Johnson. Me and my brother don’t like him no more. He’s got an eye for Wiley’
s wife, and thinks we’re too foolish to know it. I want you to kill him for me.”

  Clardy’s mouth instantly went dry. “You want me to—”

  “Keep your voice low, boy! That’s right. I want you to kill him.”

  “But … when do you want me to do it?”

  “Now. Pull that hatchet from the wall and go sink it in his noggin. Right now. Sink it right in, all the way.”

  Clardy felt wild desperation rising. Micajah Harpe was deadly serious. He had to get out of this somehow.

  “I’ll … I’ll kill him … but I can’t do it here and now. I’ll not kill a man in front of witnesses. I’ll do it later, outside, after we’ve left. That way you can say truthful that you never saw it happen.”

  “What? You don’t trust us, boy? You believe we’d tell on you?”

  “No … I … it’s … it’s the women I don’t trust. I don’t know them, you see. Women, even such fine women as yours, they can be persuaded to tell what she’s seen, if somebody scares her bad enough.”

  Micajah smiled again, very slowly, and nodded. His breath smelled like something dead, and there were tiny bits of old meat stuck between his teeth, remnants of his last meal. He wiggled one of the longer pieces with the end of his tongue, then said, “Very well, boy. We’ll do it your way. We’ll see if you’ve got the grit to run with the Harpes. You kill him, and then you come back and tell me where me and Wiley might want to take a little walk together come morning. I expect we might find us a corpse lying about while we stretch our legs. You be back before morning. You hear me?”

  “Yes.”

  “Don’t fail me. You prove yourself to me, and you’ll be glad for it later. I want Cale Johnson dead. Dead! Take his life, you take his place among us. Spare him, and you die in his place. Wiley and me will see to it.”

  God help me, why did I come here? “I’ll kill him. I will.”

  Micajah stood and turned. “Wiley, I like this young man,” he said loudly. Then to Johnson: “You did a wise thing, Cale, bringing this gent to us. He’s going to be a true help to us. He’s going to help us quite a lot.”